On Israel-Palestine and BDS

Those dedicated to the Palestinian cause
should think carefully about the tactics they choose.

The misery caused by Israel’s actions
in the occupied territories has elicited serious concern among at least some
Israelis. One of the most outspoken, for many years, has been Gideon Levy, a
columnist for Haaretz, who writes that “Israel should be condemned
and punished for creating insufferable life under occupation, [and] for the
fact that a country that claims to be among the enlightened nations continues
abusing an entire people, day and night”.

He is surely correct, and we should
add something more: the United States should also be condemned and punished for
providing the decisive military, economic, diplomatic and even ideological
support for these crimes. So long as it continues to do so, there is little reason
to expect Israel to relent in its brutal policies.

The distinguished Israeli scholar
Zeev Sternhell, reviewing the reactionary nationalist tide in his country,
writes that “the occupation will continue, land will be confiscated from its
owners to expand the settlements, the Jordan Valley will be cleansed of Arabs,
Arab Jerusalem will be strangled by Jewish neighbourhoods, and any act of
robbery and foolishness that serves Jewish expansion in the city will be
welcomed by the High Court of Justice. The road to South Africa has been paved
and will not be blocked until the Western world presents Israel with an
unequivocal choice: Stop the annexation and dismantle most of the colonies and
the settler state, or be an outcast.”

One crucial question is whether the
United States will stop undermining the international consensus, which favours
a two-state settlement along the internationally recognised border (the Green
Line established in the 1949 ceasefire agreements), with guarantees for “the
sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of all states in
the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized
boundaries”. That was the wording of a resolution brought to the UN Security
Council in January 1976 by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, supported by the Arab
states—and vetoed by the United States.

This was not the first time
Washington had barred a peaceful diplomatic settlement. The prize for that goes
to Henry Kissinger, who [as national security adviser] supported Israel’s 1971
decision to reject a settlement offered by the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat,
choosing expansion over security—a course that Israel has followed with US
support ever since. Sometimes Washington’s position becomes almost comical, as
in February 2011, when the Obama administration vetoed a UN resolution that
supported official US policy: opposition to Israel’s settlement expansion,
which continues (also with US support) despite some whispers of disapproval.

It is not expansion of the huge
settlement and infrastructure programme (including the separation wall) that is
the issue, but rather its very existence—all of it illegal, as determined by
the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice, and recognised
as such by virtually the entire world apart from Israel and the United States
since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who downgraded “illegal” to “an obstacle
to peace”.

Egregious
crimes

One way to punish Israel for its
egregious crimes was initiated by the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom in 1997—a
boycott of settlement products. Such initiatives have been considerably
expanded since then. In June, the Presbyterian Church resolved to divest from
three US-based multinationals involved in the occupation. The most far-reaching
success is the policy directive of the European Union that forbids funding,
cooperation, research awards or any similar relationship with any Israeli
entity that has “direct or indirect links” to the occupied territories, where
all settlements are illegal, as the EU declaration reiterates. Britain had
already directed retailers to “distinguish between goods originating from
Palestinian producers and goods originating from illegal Israeli settlements”.

Four years ago, Human Rights Watch
called on Israel to abide by “its international legal obligation” to remove the
settlements and to end its “blatantly discriminatory practices” in the occupied
territories. HRW also called on the United States to suspend financing to
Israel “in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of
settlements”, and to verify that tax exemptions for organisations contributing
to Israel “are consistent with US obligations to ensure respect for
international law, including prohibitions against discrimination”.

There have been a great many other
boycott and divestment initiatives in the past decade, occasionally—but not
sufficiently—reaching to the crucial matter of US support for Israeli crimes.
Meanwhile, a BDS movement (calling for “boycott, divestment and sanctions”) has
been formed, often citing South African models; more accurately, the
abbreviation should be “BD”, since sanctions, or state actions, are not on the
horizon—one of the many significant differences from South Africa.

if tactics are to be effective, they must be based on a realistic assessment of actual circumstances

The opening call of the BDS movement,
by a group of Palestinian intellectuals in 2005, demanded that Israel fully
comply with international law by “(1) Ending its occupation and colonization of
all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall; (2) Recognizing
the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full
equality; and (3) Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of
Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in
UN Resolution 194”.

This call received considerable
attention, and deservedly so. But if we’re concerned about the fate of the
victims, BD and other tactics have to be carefully thought through and
evaluated in terms of their likely consequences. The pursuit of (1) in the
above list makes good sense: it has a clear objective and is readily understood
by its target audience in the west, which is why the many initiatives guided by
(1) have been quite successful—not only in “punishing” Israel, but also in
stimulating other forms of opposition to the occupation and US support for it.

However, this is not the case for
(3). While there is near-universal international support for (1), there is
virtually no meaningful support for (3) beyond the BDS movement itself. Nor is
(3) dictated by international law. The text of the UN General Assembly
Resolution 194 is conditional, and in any event it is a recommendation, without
the legal force of the Security Council resolutions that Israel regularly
violates. Insistence on (3) is a virtual guarantee of failure.

The only slim hope for realizing (3)
in more than token numbers is if longer-term developments lead to the erosion
of the imperial borders imposed by France and Britain after World War I, which,
like similar borders, have no legitimacy. This could lead to a “no-state
solution”—the optimal one, in my view, and in the real world no less plausible
than the “one-state solution” that is commonly, but mistakenly, discussed as an
alternative to the international consensus.

The case for (2) is more ambiguous.
There are “prohibitions against discrimination” in international law, as HRW
observes. But pursuit of (2) at once opens the door to the standard “glass
house” reaction: for example, if we boycott Tel Aviv University because Israel
violates human rights at home, then why not boycott Harvard because of far
greater violations by the United States? Predictably, initiatives focusing on
(2) have been a near-uniform failure, and will continue to be unless
educational efforts reach the point of laying much more groundwork in the
public understanding for them, as was done in the case of South Africa.

Failed initiatives harm the victims
doubly—by shifting attention from their plight to irrelevant issues
(anti-Semitism at Harvard, academic freedom, etc), and by wasting current
opportunities to do something meaningful.

Dubious
analogy

Concern for the victims dictates that
in assessing tactics, we should be scrupulous in recognising what has succeeded
or failed, and why. This has not always been the case (Michael Neumann
discusses one of many examples of this failure in the winter 2014 issue of the Journal
of Palestine Studies). The same concern dictates that we must be scrupulous
about facts. Take the South African analogy, constantly cited in this context.
It is a very dubious one. There’s a reason why BDS tactics were used for
decades against South Africa while the current campaign against Israel is
restricted to BD: in the former case, activism had created such overwhelming
international opposition to apartheid that individual states and the UN had
imposed sanctions decades before the 1980s, when BD tactics began to be used
extensively in the United States. By then, Congress was legislating for sanctions
and overriding Reagan’s vetoes on the issue.

Years earlier—by 1960—global
investors had already abandoned South Africa to such an extent that its
financial reserves were halved; although there was some recovery, the
handwriting was on the wall. In contrast, US investment is flowing into Israel.
When Warren Buffett bought an Israeli tool-making firm for $2 billion last
year, he described Israel as the most promising country for investors outside
the United States itself.

While there is, finally, a growing
domestic opposition in the United States to Israeli crimes, it does not
remotely compare with the South African case. The necessary educational work
has not been done. Spokespeople for the BDS movement may believe they have attained
their “South African moment”, but that is far from accurate. And if tactics are
to be effective, they must be based on a realistic assessment of actual
circumstances.

Much the same is true of the
invocation of apartheid. Within Israel, discrimination against non-Jews is
severe; the land laws are just the most extreme example. But it is not South
African-style apartheid. In the occupied territories, the situation is far
worse than it was in South Africa, where the white nationalists needed the
black population: it was the country’s workforce and, as grotesque as the
bantustans were, the nationalist government devoted resources to sustaining and
seeking international recognition for them. In sharp contrast, Israel wants to
rid itself of the Palestinian burden. The road ahead is not toward South Africa,
as commonly alleged, but toward something much worse.

Where that road leads is unfolding
before our eyes. As Sternhell observes, Israel will continue its current
policies. It will maintain a vicious siege of Gaza, separating it from the West
Bank, as the United States and Israel have been doing ever since they accepted
the Oslo Accords in 1993. Although Oslo declared Palestine to be “a single
territorial unit”, in official Israeli parlance the West Bank and Gaza have
become “two separate and different areas”. As usual, there are security
pretexts, which collapse quickly upon examination.

In the West Bank, Israel will
continue to take whatever it finds valuable—land, water, resources—dispersing
the limited Palestinian population while integrating these acquisitions within
a Greater Israel. This includes the vastly expanded “Jerusalem” that Israel
annexed in violation of Security Council orders; everything on the Israeli side
of the illegal separation wall; corridors to the east creating unviable Palestinian
cantons; the Jordan Valley, where Palestinians are being systematically
expelled and Jewish settlements established; and huge infrastructure projects
linking all these acquisitions to Israel proper.

The road ahead leads not to South
Africa, but rather to an increase in the proportion of Jews in the Greater
Israel that is being constructed. This is the realistic alternative to a
two-state settlement. There is no reason to expect Israel to accept a
Palestinian population it does not want.

[The US secretary of state] John
Kerry was bitterly condemned when he repeated the lament—common inside
Israel—that unless the Israelis accept some kind of two-state solution, their
country will become an apartheid state, ruling over a territory with an
oppressed Palestinian majority and facing the dreaded “demographic problem”:
too many non-Jews in a Jewish state. The proper criticism is that this common
belief is a mirage. As long as the United States supports Israel’s expansionist
policies, there is no reason to expect them to cease. Tactics have to be
designed accordingly.

However, there is one comparison to
South Africa that is realistic—and significant. In 1958, South Africa’s foreign
minister informed the US ambassador that it didn’t much matter if South Africa
became a pariah state. The UN may harshly condemn South Africa, he said, but,
as the ambassador put it, “what mattered perhaps more than all other votes put
together was that of [the] US in view of its predominant position of leadership
in [the] Western world”. For forty years, ever since it chose expansion over
security, Israel has made essentially the same judgment.

For South Africa, the calculation was
fairly successful for a long time. In 1970, casting its first-ever veto of a
Security Council resolution, the United States joined Britain to block action
against the racist regime of Southern Rhodesia, a move that was repeated in
1973. Eventually, Washington became the UN veto champion by a wide margin,
primarily in defence of Israeli crimes. But by the 1980s, South Africa’s
strategy was losing its efficacy. In 1987, even Israel—perhaps the only country
then violating the arms embargo against South Africa—agreed to “reduce its ties
to avoid endangering relations with the US Congress”, the director general of
the Israeli foreign ministry reported. The concern was that Congress might
punish Israel for its violation of recent US law. In private, Israeli officials
assured their South African friends that the new sanctions would be mere
“window dressing”. A few years later, South Africa’s last supporters in
Washington joined the world consensus, and the apartheid regime soon collapsed.

In South Africa, a compromise was
reached that was satisfactory to the country’s elites and to US business
interests: apartheid was ended, but the socioeconomic regime remained. In
effect, there would be some black faces in the limousines, but privilege and
profit would not be much affected. In Palestine, there is no similar compromise
in prospect.

Cuban
internationalism

Another decisive factor in South
Africa was Cuba. As Piero Gleijeses has demonstrated in his masterful scholarly
work, Cuban internationalism, which has no real analogue today, played a
leading role in ending apartheid and in the liberation of black Africa
generally. There was ample reason why Nelson Mandela visited Havana soon after
his release from prison, declaring: “We come here with a sense of the great
debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record
of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”

He was quite correct. Cuban forces
drove the South African aggressors out of Angola, were a key factor in
releasing Namibia from their brutal grip, and made it very clear to the
apartheid regime that its dream of imposing its rule over South Africa and the
region was turning into a nightmare. In Mandela’s words, Cuban forces
“destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor”, which he said
“was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my
people—from the scourge of apartheid”.

Cuban “soft power” was no less
effective, including 70,000 highly skilled aid workers and scholarships in Cuba
for thousands of Africans. In radical contrast, Washington was not only the
last holdout in protecting South Africa, but even continued afterward to
support the murderous Angolan terrorist forces of Jonas Savimbi, “a monster
whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people”, in the words
of Marrack Goulding, the British ambassador to Angola—a verdict seconded by the
CIA.

Palestinians can hope for no such
saviour. This is all the more reason why those who are sincerely dedicated to
the Palestinian cause should avoid illusion and myth, and think carefully about
the tactics they choose and the course they follow.

This article
was published in the 21-28 July 2014 issue of the Nation magazine and on 2 July
on www.thenation.com. It is
reproduced here with courtesy and appreciation.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Security for the future: in search of a new vision

What does ‘security’ mean to you? The Ammerdown Invitation seeks your participation in a new civic conversation about national security in the UK and beyond. Its authors offer an analysis of the shortcomings of current approaches and propose a different vision of the future. Please use the invitation summary document for seminars, workshops and public meetings, and share the responses and insights that emerge.

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.